Gladstone: A Biography
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The anti-plutocratic theme was an interesting and delicate one for Gladstone, for he most certainly was not an egalitarian. Ruskin, staying at Hawarden in January 1878 (‘In some respects an unrivalled guest, and those important respects too’),23 had suggested that Gladstone was in the category of those who believed ‘one man [was] as good as another’. ‘I am nothing of the sort,’ Gladstone was reported as replying. ‘I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle – the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian.’24 He believed that men should have the opportunity to accumulate large fortunes. Some of his strongest provincial supporters, moved by his moral fire although mostly Nonconformist and not sharing his Anglicanism, were engaged at the time in doing precisely that. And he perhaps believed even more strongly in the hereditary principle. But he was against the flaunting of wealth, whether it was old or new. He took this view partly, but only partly, on conservative, social-order grounds. He did not want the poor stirred up by profligacy into an unwillingness to accept their lot.
He also believed that the flaunting of great wealth was morally bad. What he liked best was an austere duke of large fortune (he had had too much trouble with the Newcastles to want poor dukes), public spirit, intellectual interest and Liberal views, living well within his income and ploughing the rest back to secure the future of his estates and his heirs. Trollope’s Duke of Omnium (Plantagenet Palliser before he succeeded, not the self-indulgent and corrupting old Duke) was very much to his taste, except that had Trollope lived to write sequels in the late 1880s, they would almost certainly have portrayed Omnium as a Liberal Unionist. What Gladstone liked next best were men like Samuel Morley, a Congregationalist teetotaller who became a Nottingham hosiery magnate. Morley devoted much of his immense fortune to building Dissenting chapels and to general philanthropy, subsidizing both the Liberal Daily News (of which he was principal proprietor) and the political career of his son. This son, Arnold Morley, became Gladstone’s Home Rule Chief Whip after the Brands and the Glyns and the Grosvenors had defected. What Gladstone liked least was plutocratic display, particularly when it was accompanied by any fondness for Disraeli’s imperialism. His least favourite ducal family was probably the Marlboroughs, of whom he harshly said in 1882: ‘there never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down that had either morals or principles.’25 98
There was no absence of either morals or principles in his Glasgow University address. Apart from his repudiation of luxury and the obsessive pursuit of mammon, he extolled ‘the intellectual dignity’ of a vocation ‘in the Christian ministry’, elevated ratiocination to the centre of human experience (‘thought is the citadel’), and left his audience with four guides which they should follow in controversy: ‘truth, charity, diligence and reverence’. The address lasted one and a half hours and sounds austere fare for the traditionally rumbustious rectorial occasion. ‘The blue caps [the Tory students] as well as the red [Liberal] cheered fervently, at the close,’ he wrote.26 The explanation which John Morley gave was that all, even those for whom the topics and the treatment were not particularly sympathetic, were so captivated by the sheer quality of the physical performance that they were sorry, even after ninety minutes, ‘when the stream of fascinating melody ceased to flow’.27To believe that the students wanted still more is perhaps a tall order, but the indisputable fact remains that, in contrast with some more modern Glasgow rectorial occasions, there were no eggs, no catcalls and sustained applause. And it took place at a time of tense political controversy.
There was then a late luncheon (and another speech) in the second great hall on the University’s new (opened in 1870) Gilmore Hall site. After a pause of little more than an hour he was on his way to the St Andrew’s Hall, the home of Glasgow music until it was destroyed by fire in 1962, where he addressed 6500 for another one and a half hours. Then at nine he went on to the City Hall where he spoke, without apparent flagging, to another 2500. ‘Did not God in his mercy wonderfully bear me through?’28 he laconically (for once) mused.
The next day he received the Freedom of Motherwell and Hamilton before spending a Saturday to Monday at Dalzell, the middle Clyde Valley house of a Liberal MP. Then he returned by train to Hawarden, through another series of station demonstrations at Carlisle, Preston, Wigan, Warrington and Chester. These railway crowds brought those whom it was calculated he had addressed (in thirty speeches and over his fifteen-day circuit) to the precise figure of 86,930.29 As a less friendly observer also calculated that he had delivered himself of 85,840 words during this fortnight, there was a close balance between output and audience.
Gladstone arrived back at Hawarden in high morale. Lucy Cavendish, who was there, recorded in a phrase as vivid as it is dated that, while her aunt took to her bed in a state of exhaustion, Uncle William was ‘as fresh as paint’. Moreover, she thought him, for the first time, ‘a little personally elated’.30 His mood and behaviour were that of a general after a decisive battle, anxious to pause and write his despatches rather than to be off in hot pursuit and in search of the next engagement. On the first day he stayed in bed until mid-morning ‘nursing my throat’. Then he felled a sycamore in the afternoon as well as revising his rectorial address for publication by John Murray, writing to the Scotsman to refine some point, and beginning the revision of all his Midlothian speeches, also for publication, which he was surprised, a few days later, to discover amounted to a book of 255 pages. He showed no desire to exploit his triumph by going to London, seeing his colleagues and adding to the turbulence which his thunderous campaign had already created for the official Liberal leadership.
There had been a divisive plan to give Gladstone a London banquet on his return from Midlothian, which would in effect have been an anti-Hartington rally. That had been dropped, wisely if Liberal unity on the threshold of a general election was regarded as desirable. Then there was a proposition, strangely headed by A. J. Mundella, Radical MP for Sheffield and a leading instigator of anti-Turkish indignation in the autumn of 1876, that there should be a banquet of loyalty to Hartington in February. Next, with one of those pieces of elephantine subtlety beloved of whips and other political fixers, it was thought that circles could be squared and the embarrassment of the principals combined with the entertainment of the audience by getting Gladstone to preside over this feast. Two hundred and forty Liberal MPs subscribed to the projected pageant, and Gladstone unenthusiastically consulted Granville about whether he should accept. Fortunately Hartington had the robust good sense to turn it down flat. The 240 MPs got their money back, and Gladstone was saved having to make a speech even more rich than usual in convoluted obscurities and qualifying sub-clauses.
Hartington shared with William Harcourt, and with almost no one else who worked closely with Gladstone, the quality of being undazzled by him. Many of the others were often irritated by and sometimes (behind his back) deeply critical of Gladstone. But they were nonetheless to a greater or lesser extent swept away by the force of his personality. Hartington and Harcourt, although sharply different characters in other respects, who moreover ended up in diametrically opposite political camps, were the only two batsmen who were not intimidated by his fast bowling, Hartington because he just stood there, letting the balls bounce past him, and Harcourt because he hit back with confidence if not always with skill. Hartington’s phlegmatic character was brilliantly caught by a description which Derby wrote in his diary after a visit by him to Knowsley in October 1879. Hartington, although in many ways the quintessential Whig aristocrat in politics, never got on particularly well with his fellow landed magnates, neither Derby himself, whom he once dismissed as no more than an owner of Liverpool ground rents, or Salisbury, who was too much of a non-sporting intellectual for Hartington’s taste and who, when they were working in close alliance in 1891, retaliated by complaining that ‘Hartington is at Newmarket and all political arrangements have to be hung up till some quadruped has run faster than some other quadruped.’31
Derby’s descri
ption of Hartington was:
He talks of politics sensibly but without animation, and leaves on one’s mind the impression of thinking the whole concern a nuisance. . . . He talks in a slow, drawling way, as if the exertion of opening his mouth were disagreeable; but what he says is sound, hard sense, conveyed in few words. He has some humour and enjoys a joke. I cannot imagine him excited or angry.32
This picture of Hartington as an early and cisatlantic exponent of the style of speech practised by some East Coast American gentlemen and known as ‘Long Island lockjaw’ is a vivid one. Hartington, however, was both more intelligent and more ambitious than conventional wisdom allows. After a shaky start he had come quite to enjoy being Liberal leader and probably thought that his efforts in this role meant that he deserved to be Prime Minister, even though his mixture of realism and negligence made him unwilling to fight for the top job in either 1880 or 1886. Nevertheless he was seriously discussing (with Granville and Forster) as late as October 1879 the possibility that Gladstone might be prepared to serve under him as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and during the 1880 election campaign he bestirred himself to make no less than twenty-four speeches, well in excess of Gladstone’s own fifteen. They did not have the same resonance, although their impact was far from negligible and, like Gladstone’s, they were subsequently collected into a book. His criticisms of Disraeli were sharp, and there were indications of further measures of Liberal reform, affecting local government, the franchise and even land tenure. He was then forty-six years old, and was undoubtedly trying.
Gladstone stayed at Hawarden over Christmas and ten days into the New Year. His seventieth-birthday thoughts were even more than usually a mixture of exultation at the strength which God personally gave him, somewhat routine self-criticism and an old man’s awareness that he must be approaching the end of his life:
For the last 3½ years I have been passing through a political experience which is I believe without example in our Parliamentary history. I profess . . . to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice humanity freedom law.... If I really believe this then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God. And certainly I cannot but believe that He has given me special gifts of strength, on the late occasion especially in Scotland. But alas the poor little garden of my own soul remains uncultivated, unweeded, defaced. . . . Three things I would ask of God over and above all the bounty which surrounds me. This first that I may escape into retirement.99 This second that I may speedily be able to divest myself of everything resembling wealth. And the third – if I may – that when God calls me He may call me speedily. To die in Church appears to be a great euthanasia [a curious use of the word]: but not [at] a time to disturb worshippers. Such are some of the old man’s thoughts, in whom there is still something that consents not to be old.33
Most of the last twenty days of January were taken up with the death and burial of Gladstone’s sister Helen. She was reported as dangerously ill on the 10th, and less than thirty-six hours later he and Sir Thomas and Lady Gladstone were on the night boat to Ostend for Cologne. She died four days after they arrived, and they then stayed nearly another week, clearing up and assembling the doubtful evidence for her having reverted to the Anglican faith, or at least rejected post-Vatican Council Roman Catholicism.
There followed a four-day visit to Fasque and Helen’s physically safe if doctrinally doubtful funeral and burial in the Episcopalian chapel there. On the Perth train from Euston Gladstone ‘made a stage of the journey with Ld Hartington, alone, & conversed on the situation’. It was much the longest of his only three encounters with Hartington between the two phases of his Midlothian campaign, and was another indication (compare the journey with H. A. Bruce in 1871) of the chance intimacies which, much more than today, were a feature of Victorian railway travel.100
Disraeli, encouraged by the false dawn of two favourable by-election results, announced the dissolution of Parliament on 8 March and Gladstone returned to Edinburgh a week later. This time he went from London and was greeted by thousands at all the major stations of the east-coast route. At Grantham the Mayor headed 2000. At York the Lord Mayor brought 6000, and at Newcastle there were too many to count. In Edinburgh ‘the wonderful scene of November there was exactly renewed’. Such repetition, which broadly persisted throughout the two subsequent weeks, had the advantage of avoiding any sense of let-down for Gladstone and the disadvantage of leaving little fresh now to describe. Again he stayed for most of the nights at Dalmeny, although Lord Rosebery, who did not believe in promoting a campaign by halves, had also taken a house for Gladstone’s use in George Street in the heart of the New Town,101 and Gladstone spent five nights there (and, typically, three days mostly in bed) as well as using it for the day and evening of the poll and count. He also spent one night at Lord Reay’s house near Galashiels.
The speeches were once again splendid on-the-spot successes. But it was a second gallop around the course, as far as both subjects and venues were concerned. The most memorable was his winding-up speech at West Calder, which modest town always seemed to pull out his oratorical stops, on the Friday before the Monday poll. By then, owing to the spread-out nature of the polling days in different constituencies, he knew that the national result would be a Liberal victory. Furthermore he had already been elected for Leeds and was almost certainly going to win Midlothian. So there was no question of his being in a contra mundum mood, forced to fall back on the defiant faithful. Yet he chose to sound his most explicit ‘masses against the classes’, the ‘nation against selfish interests’ note:
We have great forces arrayed against us, and apparently we cannot make our appeal to the aristocracy, excepting that which must never be forgotten, the distinguished and enlightened minority of that body of able, energetic, patriotic and liberal-minded men, whose feelings are with those of the people, and who decorate and dignify their rank by their strong sympathy with the entire community. With that exception, I am sorry to say that we cannot reckon upon what is called the landed interest, we cannot reckon upon the clergy of the established church either in England or in Scotland, subject again and always in each case to the most noble exceptions, exceptions, I trust, likely to enlarge and multiply from day to day. On none of these can we place our trust. We cannot reckon on the wealth of the country, nor upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which rank and wealth normally bring. In the main these powers are against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organized monopoly, wherever there is a sectional and narrow interest apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there, gentlemen, we, the Liberal party, have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above all these, and behind all these, there is something greater than these – there is the nation itself. This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder still and more hopeless to resist. . . . We have none of the forms of a judicial trial. There are no peers in Westminster Hall, there are no judges on the woolsack; but if we concentrate our mind upon the truth of the case as apart from its mere exterior, it is a grander and more august spectacle than was ever exhibited either in Westminster Hall or in the House of Lords. For a nation, called to undertake a great and responsible duty, – a duty which is to tell, as we are informed from high authority, on the peace of Europe and of the destinies of England [he would not get away with that word in Midlothian today], – has found its interests mismanaged, its honour tarnished, and its strength burdened and weakened by needless, mischievous, unauthorised, and unfortifiable engagements and it has resolved that this state of things shall cease, and that right and justice shall be done.34
So were the burghers of West Calder asked to rise above any narrow material interests and so were they sent away with the impression that they were morally superior to the plutocracy and had laid upon them a more serious jud
gemental duty than even the most elevated of bewigged dignitaries. And so ended too the Midlothian campaign.
The result was declared in the early evening of 7 April. Gladstone did not go to the count but remained in the George Street house until Reid, the principal agent and one of the brilliantly accurate conductors of the canvass of January 1879, brought him the figures. Reid could have said ‘Here is the result, Mr Gladstone, from which you will see that your two great series of speeches may have changed six votes since the estimate that I gave you before you set foot in the constituency.’ But I doubt if Reid did. He was more likely to have been caught up in the enthusiasm of the assembled crowd of 15,000 whom Gladstone, followed by Rosebery, addressed briefly (for him) from a window of the house before returning in a torchlight procession to Dalmeny. Gladstone’s mood was not triumphalist. ‘Quite satisfactory’ was his restrained comment on the result and he distributed some of the credit to others, noting that Rosebery spoke ‘excellently well’ and that ‘wonderful, & nothing less, has been the disposing guiding hand of God in all this matter’.35
That night, with his extraordinary capacity for concentration under excitement, he wrote his address of thanks to the electors. The next evening he left Edinburgh by train and with three hours of sleep despite ‘frightful unearthly noises at Warrington’ reached Hawarden the following morning. He stayed there for twelve days in what can only be described as a mood of elation. His sole complaint was against the volume of incoming mail. And even here there was a mixture of satisfaction and dismay: ‘Postal arrivals 140! Horrible!’ For the rest his enthusiasm and beneficence was unexampled. He was reading Scott’s Guy Mannering, ‘dear Guy Mannering’, he wrote, and ‘that most heavenly man George Herbert’. There were two Lyttelton nephews staying. Neville, later a general, was ‘a real fine fellow’. Edward, later headmaster of Eton, was a ‘capital fellow’, who helped with the mail. The return, first of Herbert and then of Willy Gladstone from their electoral contests, were triumphant occasions of estate loyalty. Samuel Plimsoll (MP for Derby and famous for his ‘line’), who was in reality making a good-natured nuisance of himself by his determination to organize a victory parade for Gladstone’s entry into London, which could hardly have been less helpful in relation to the Queen, Hartington or Granville, was nonetheless summoned to Hawarden for a night and, although ‘overflowing with his own subject of the Mercantile Marine’, was found ‘an original and childlike man, full of reality and enthusiasm’.36 John Bright ‘came over from Llandudno’ and was ‘most kind and satisfactory’.37 There never was a time when Gladstone wrote with such benignity about everybody and everything.